Space Viking H. Beam Piper (life books to read .TXT) 📖

the time they were over the city, nobody was in sight. They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso. It hadn’t saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of shelling. Light chemical-explosive stuff; this city was too good a cow for even those two to kill before the milking was over.

They circled slowly over it at a thousand feet. When they turned away, black smoke began rising from what might have been pottery works or brickkilns on the outskirts; something resinous had evidently been fed to the fires. Other columns of black smoke began rising across the countryside on both sides of the river.

“You know, these people are civilized, if you don’t limit the term to contragravity and nuclear energy,” Harkaman said. “They have gunpowder, for one thing, and I can think of some rather impressive Old Terran civilizations that didn’t have that much. They have an organized society, and anybody who has that is starting toward civilization.”

“I hate to think of what’ll happen to this planet if Spasso and Valkanhayn stay here long.”

“Might be a good thing, in the long run. Good things in the long run are often tough while they’re happening. I know what’ll happen to Spasso and Valkanhayn, though. They’ll start decivilizing, themselves. They’ll stay here for a while, and when they need something they can’t take from the locals they’ll go chicken-stealing after it, but most of the time they’ll stay here lording it over their slaves, and finally their ships will wear out and they won’t be able to fix them. Then, some time, the locals’ll jump them when they aren’t watching and wipe them out. But in the meantime, the locals’ll learn a lot from them.”

They turned the aircar west again along the river. They looked at a few villages. One or two dated from the Federation period; they had been plantations before whatever it was had happened. More had been built within the past five centuries. A couple had recently been destroyed, in punishment for the crime of self-defense.

“You know,” he said, at length, “I’m going to do everybody a favor. I’m going to let Spasso and Valkanhayn persuade me to take this planet away from them.”

Harkaman, who was piloting, turned sharply. “You crazy or something?”

“ ‘When somebody makes a statement you don’t understand, don’t tell him he’s crazy. Ask him what he means.’ Who said that?”

“On target,” Harkaman grinned. “ ‘What do you mean, Lord Trask?’ ”

“I can’t catch Dunnan by pursuit; I’ll have to get him by interception. You know the source of that quotation, too. This looks to me like a good place to intercept him. When he learns I have a base here, he’ll hit it, sooner or later. And even if he doesn’t, we can pick up more information on him, when ships start coming in here, than we would batting around all over the Old Federation.”

Harkaman considered for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, if we could set up a base like Nergal or Xochitl,” he agreed. “There’ll be four or five ships, Space Vikings, traders, Gilgameshers and so on, on either of those planets all the time. If we had the cargo Dunnan took to space in the Enterprise, we could start a base like that. But we haven’t anything near what we need, and you know what Spasso and Valkanhayn have.”

“We can get it from Gram. As it stands, the investors in the Tanith Adventure, from Duke Angus down, lost everything they put into it. If they’re willing to throw some good money after bad, they can get it back, and a handsome profit to boot. And there ought to be planets above the rowboat and oxcart level not too far away that could be raided for a lot of things we’d need.”

“That’s right; I know of half a dozen within five hundred light-years. They won’t be the kind Spasso and Valkanhayn are in the habit of raiding, though. And besides machinery, we can get gold, and valuable merchandise that could be sold on Gram. And if we could make a go of it, you’d go farther hunting Dunnan by sitting here on Tanith than by going looking for him. That was the way we used to hunt marsh pigs on Colada, when I was a kid; just find a good place and sit down and wait.”

They had Valkanhayn and Spasso aboard the Nemesis for dinner; it didn’t take much guiding to keep the conversation on the subject of Tanith and its resources, advantages and possibilities. Finally, when they had reached brandy and coffee, Trask said idly:

“I believe, together, we could really make something out of this planet.”

“That’s what we’ve been telling you, all along,” Spasso broke in eagerly. “This is a wonderful planet⁠—”

“It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We’d need a spaceport, for one thing.”

“Well, what’s this, here?” Valkanhayn wanted to know.

“It was a spaceport,” Harkaman told him. “It could be one again. And we’d need a shipyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work. Capable of building a complete ship, in fact. I never saw a ship come into a Viking base planet with any kind of a cargo worth dickering over that hadn’t taken some damage getting it. Prince Viktor of Xochitl makes a good half of his money on ship repairs, and so do Nikky Gratham on Jagannath and the Everrards on Hoth.”

“And engine works, hyperdrive, normal space and pseudograv,” Trask added. “And a steel mill, and a collapsed-matter plant. And robotic-equipment works, and⁠—”

“Oh, that’s out of all reason!” Valkanhayn cried. “It would take twenty trips with a ship the size of this one to get all that stuff here, and how’d we ever be able to pay for it?”

“That’s the sort of base Duke Angus of Wardshaven planned. The Enterprise, practically a duplicate of the